Last month, Chris and I had the privilege of being asked to present to this season’s xAPI Learning Cohort xAPI Party. If you’re not already familiar with the xAPI Cohort, I highly recommend checking it out. The team over at TorranceLearning has been running these for several years now, and it is a fantastic opportunity to get your hands dirty with the xAPI spec. It’s a great “learn by doing” sort of thing.
Chris and I didn’t want to do your typical run of the mill xAPI presentation. Instead we decided to do what we do best, and that’s simply to have a conversation about the eLearning standards we talk about day in and day out on SCORM and the Experience API also known as xAPI. We ended up structuring the conversations as a debate we like to call “Between Two Standards”, with Chris representing SCORM and me taking the side of xAPI. Essentially, this was a conversation where we both answered some difficult questions about our given standard, with the ultimate goal of helping folks determine when SCORM is the right tool for the job, or when to leverage xAPI. Our list of questions included some of the following:
- “Now that Flash is dead and mobile is king, does anyone have a use for SCORM anymore?”
- “How does xAPI handle LMS launched content?”
- “With xAPI being able to do everything SCORM does, when will SCORM go away?”
- “How does xAPI record the Big 4 (Completion, Pass/Fail, Score and Duration)?”
- “Is SCORM only good for compliance training?”
- “Recipes, Registries, Libraries, and Profiles? What’s up with all that?”
Check out the recording of our presentation and let us know where you stand on the SCORM vs xAPI debate. As always, we’re here to help you make sense of the eLearning standards. We spend a lot of time helping people make an informed choice for their content format, next RFP or product evaluation. We’re happy to help you too, so go ahead and ask us anything.
